Simon’s Blog

Last week, I needed to get hold of a new wireless presentation controller (i.e. a remote control for PowerPoint). Usually, I would buy this kind of thing on-line, but this was for a presentation I had to give first thing the next morning. So, I needed to go to a store. A quick survey of user reviews of these devices told me which model was the best to buy, and off I went to my local computer superstore. The problem was that when I arrived, I found they were out of stock. What happened next - a kind of manual mash-up of services - made some real benefits of mobile location-based services crystallise in my mind. This was a timely experience, I think, because some current thinking is that location-based services provide no benefits. Here’s the story.

I happened to get a call from a colleague on my cell phone whilst I was in the store, and he mentioned a chain of shops that lets you check the stock of items on-line. I told him the name of the product and my location, and the search came back with a list of stores that had the product in stock, ordered by distance from where I was. What’s more, with that chain, you get a 30% discount if you reserve the item on-line, and go to pick it up in store. So, my colleague reserved the item for me and SMS texted me the reservation code. The closest store was about 25 miles away, in a place I didn’t know - so, I punched the address into my car’s GPS satellite navigation system. The car took me right to the front door, and my new presentation remote was waiting for me inside, which I purchased with my 30% discount. It was a pretty good experience. And it made me realise that shopping in-store really could be genuinely improved by mobile location-based services.

Two of the main the things that people love about on-line shopping are that it removes much of the hassle associated with shopping in stores, and it makes it easy to get the best deal. And that’s what mobile location-based services could do for shopping in stores too. Because I’d reserved the item, I knew the store would have the item ready and waiting for me to collect (no hassle finding the item in the store or finding it’s out of stock); and I got a great discount (saving me money, and more than offsetting the fuel costs of travelling to the store). All that’s needed to enable businesses to build these types of systems is for mobile phones to have full-featured, standards-compliant web-browsers; and GPS; and of course for the relevant APIs to be open on the phones.